Turning to the Other. Donovan D. Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ his rhetoric as one who must use indirect communication to get his readers to see what he knows—the reality they are overlooking thanks to their cultural blinders.

In a very telling confession, Buber revealed the nature of his task as a writer from another angle. In a letter to the American philosopher Malcolm Diamond, he wrote that he does not make a rational or historical argument for relational reality, for that would lead his readers astray. Rather, he seeks to directly address his reader as Thou, to engage the reader in the reality of which he speaks: “In the final analysis, I do not appeal . . . to historical prototypes . . . but to the actual and possible life of my reader. The intention of my writings is really a wholly intimate dialogical one.”187

      5. Buber’s Rhetorical Tools Applied in I and Thou—An Overview

      I and Thou showcases the range of Buber’s gifts as a master rhetorician. As we have seen, Buber’s struggle with his grief during that second dark, lonely period became his struggle to bring what he had undergone in his spiritual awakening to full expression. This act of testifying was the life task to which he had been called. During the months after Landauer’s murder, the struggle to accomplish this task became inseparable from the gestation and bringing to light of his testament, I and Thou. Therefore, his struggle to find the means to express his awakening resulted in his creation of the rhetorical tools for this task and in their application in the writing of I and Thou. We now turn to consider how the task of witness that requires indirect communication and pointing became embodied in the vision and the rhetoric of I and Thou.

      Using dialogical means to convey his message, Buber deftly moves among multiple voices in his discourse. Most commonly he lays down the foundations of his dialogical vision with the authoritative or vatic voice. Occasionally, a negating voice clarifies Buber’s ideas by telling what they are not. From time to time, the voice of an interlocutor breaks in, graphically marked off from the rest of the text through the use of dashes, to advance the exposition through dialogical questions and comments. A debunking voice also arises to critique modernity’s preoccupation with the It-world. At another point an ironic voice indirectly critiques the reductionistic stance of the modern It-world mentality. Throughout the text a poetic or literary voice uses metaphors and literary allusions to make a point. Finally, Buber’s personal voice sounds forth, through which he presents his own experiences of dialogical reality.

      Buber provides the straightforward exposition of definitions and distinctions in the authoritative or vatic voice, such as in the laying out of the differences between the I-It stance and the I-Thou stance at the beginning of I and Thou (§§1–9). Working in short declarative sentences, he successively offers the characteristics, workings, power, and limits of each stance. As part of this exposition he uses negations, statements showing how certain ersatz perceptions and concepts are not adequate for understanding his points. For example, at the outset he defines “primal words” by using a pattern of negation and affirmation: “not . . . but . . . “ (§§1c, 2a, 2b). Occasionally, as in §10m, he uses questions to advance the exposition. And from time to time, as in §11, he uses the first-person pronoun. He also uses poetic images such as Weltnetz (“world grid,” §11b) or Himmelkreis (“firmament,” §11b) and metaphors such as “chrysalis” and “butterfly” (§22c and again in §§53c and 61l), and even negations (§11b) to reinforce the distinction between I-It and I-Thou.

In this exposition Buber plays with word roots such as gegen-, as in Gegenwart (“Presence”) and Gegenstand (“object”). In §16a, then in §17a–d, he develops the differences between the two to elaborate his opening distinction between I-Thou and I-It. At times he takes a reproachful tone to expose the illusory use of the It-world (§18a–c). He appeals to the evolution of language (§23b–c), of perceptions, such as of the moon (§23d), of concepts such as mana (§23e), and even the sense of the self (§23f). To show that I-Thou is more primal, basic, and authentic than I-It, he traces the genealogy of the distinction, first in human cultural evolution (§§24–27b), and then in the development of the human individual from prenatal existence to maturity (§§27a–28c). The exposition builds to a climax at the end of part one: there Buber presents two stark alternatives—the reader must choose between the stance that operates in the It-world and the stance that opens to the world of Thou (§29b–c). In the last words of part one, Buber uses the vocative Du, an insistently dialogical device, to reach out and touch the reader intimately, to confront the reader with the decision at hand: “And in all seriousness of truth, you: without It a human being cannot live; but whoever lives only with It is not a human being” (§30g). Kaufmann translates Buber’s du here as “listen.” He notes that Buber uncharacteristically uses this du as the idiomatic German pronoun of address to express intimacy such as that between lovers or close friends.188

Buber explicitly incorporates dialogue into the text of I and Thou by inserting the interjections of a second voice, the voice of an anonymous interlocutor—a modern “everyman”—which is introduced by a dash at the beginning of a paragraph break, followed by a reply in Buber’s voice, also set off with a dash. There are twelve such breaks in the text (§§13, 21, 25, 26, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 48, 50, and 57).189 Following Wood’s analysis, these interlocutor passages serve at times to break the logical sequence of ideas (§§21, 26, and 41), to initiate a new line of exposition (§§13, 35, 39, 41, 42, and 57), or to stimulate the further development of a theme in the course of its exposition (§§25, 37, 48, and 50).190

      These explicitly dialogical moments serve to propel Buber’s exposition forward. While they are anonymous, they work much like Daniel’s explicitly named interlocutors in the five dialogues that comprise Buber’s Daniel: Dialogues on Realization. They also echo the student auditors recorded in the transcript of his eight lectures on “Religion as Presence” at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus who freely asked questions during his lectures. Yet, there is more of a dramatic sense in Daniel where the interlocutors in the dialogues are named and each character introduces extradiegetic actions and events. In the Lehrhaus lectures, Buber responded to his auditors’ questions with a spontaneity that shows him thinking out loud to formulate an understanding. By contrast, the interlocutor in I and Thou mostly asks questions that elicit further clarification or the explication of an issue in the unfolding exposition. Most often the interlocutor expresses a common-sense attitude or shows a common misunderstanding which Buber then corrects. Several of the interlocutors’ twelve passages ask Buber to comment on the underside of his presentation, such as the question about hate as the underside of love (§21); or about early humanity’s “hell” as opposed to its enjoyment of the Thou (§26); or the introduction of Napoleon as a person being consumed by his cause in contrast to Socrates, Goethe, and Jesus (§41).

      Buber’s responses to the interlocutor typically come in an authoritative, vatic voice that, as a rejoinder to the interlocutor, moves the exposition forward. In response to the longest of the interlocutor passages where a series of eight long questions amounts to a reaffirmation of the It-world as the status quo (§35a), Buber retorts, calling the questioner a Redender, a “windbag” (§35a). He then proceeds to offer his counterpoint, much as he asks his readers to do with their own choices and lives. By contrast, when the next question assumes the constancy of the common-sense I, Buber’s exposition of the counterpoint is more gentle: “Let us test, let us test ourselves, to see . . .” (§39b). Buber can even respond autobiographically, as he does in response to a question about mystical discourse as testimony to oneness: “I do not know of a single kind, but of two kinds of events in which duality is no longer perceived. In their discourse mystics often mix them up, as I too once did” (§50g). Thus, Buber’s shifts in his use of the interlocutor allow his book to be explicitly dialogical, dramatizing the issues at stake with a sometimes avuncular, sometimes admonishing, but always vatic tone. Buber’s use of this voice tends to turn the text into a teaching dialogue.

      Buber uses an oppositional, debunking voice when he critiques elements of a wide range of positions in order to clear space for the authentic reality of true dialogue. The longest section of the text critiques doctrines of mystical absorption across three major traditions: Hinduism, Christianity, and Buddhism (§50). Late in I and Thou, Buber critiques СКАЧАТЬ